EFF wants $30,000 to defeat a podcasting patent troll

In a single day, tech legal group raises nearly $11,000 of its lofty goal.

On Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that it was launching a new fundraising campaign to defeat a pretty blatant patent troll: Personal Audio LLC, a company that claims to have invented podcasting.

We covered the EFF's effort when it first launched in early 2013, after Personal Audio sued a few big-name podcasts including the Adam Carolla Show and Stuff You Should Know podcasts.

The EFF says it needs to raise money specifically to pay for an “inter partes review,” a trial proceeding that examines prior art. A 2011 piece of federal legislation called the America Invents Act gave the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) greater authority over its own fees, and those fees have since skyrocketed.

“[The inter partes review fees] will cost approximately $25,000 and we'll likely have other costs as well,” Julie Samuels, the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents at the EFF, told Ars. “The types of reviews we did in the older patent busting cases had fees of approximately $2,000. Big difference, obviously, and further proof that the patent system is stacked against the little guy.”

At the time of this writing, the EFF has received nearly $11,000 in donations towards a total goal of $30,000.

Update: This patent seems to have really struck a nerve. EFF raised the $30,000 needed in less than 10 hours—and money kept coming in. There's now more than $47,000 donated to the cause less than 24 hours after the fundraiser was announced.

So basically you're donating money that's gonna go directly to the USPTO? Wouldn't it be better in the long run to keep the money in your pocket and wait for the entire system to come grinding to a halt and Congress finally realises they need to change things?

Perhaps the fees adequately reflect the amount of effort the PTO has to go through now. You think it really took $2k to review an entire genre of technology?

I guess it's just easier to scream about spending than actually think for a moment.

Well, considering its because they didn't do their job in the first place, I guess the real problem is that they didn't charge enough for the patent. Or maybe bill the patent owner if it gets overturned on prior art. Seems foolish to make the victim of patent abuse pay. That's like charging the victim of a mugging for prosecuting the attacker.

It is no doubt easier to give a patent application a tick than reject it, thus approving patents improves efficiency. (I worked in planning, and refusing a planning application means a whole lot of extra work so you avoid it if you can: your efficiency is measured by how many applications you process and 1 refusal takes as much work as 10 approvals. I imagine a similar dynamic in the patents office.)

Approving inappropriate patents means they are likely to be contested by other parties. Operating like big business, the expectation is that this problem should be turned into an opportunity: charge big fees for the review process. (I also worked for a number of big businesses, and discovered: sloppy work = more money from customer as they pay to fix it, so poor work = big profit : the idea is to create repeat business)

What a fantastic system. The USPTO demands $25K to clean up a smelly piece of trash that it should never have let through in the first place. Let's say the patent is invalidated, which is essentially the patent office admitting they didn't do their job correctly. Then we should get a refund on that $25K, right? Right?!? (Crickets.mp3)

This is little more than a extortion scheme against the public and legitimate businesses who suffer from these junk patents.

It looks like the most profitable of all patents are really bad ones. The worst the patent, the more likely a large payoff will result, since the worse the patent, the more likely it will be appealed.

To start with, the granted patents bring in maintenance fees over the life of the patent. The filing fees for rejected patents are only in the hundreds to a few thousand dollars, depending upon the research fees. But the maintenance fees are $12.6K over the life of the patent.

But the big payoffs are when bad patents are appealed. That's when the big money starts rolling in. This article is an example. Since the patent was granted, they get to look forward to the $12.6K of maintenance fees. But because it's being appealed, they've hit the jackpot!

The fact that the EFF needs $30K just to start the appeals process demonstrates what I'm talking about.

If a requirement of the patent office is to pay its own way, then it becomes a big conflict of interest when it comes to granting only high quality patents. It seems it's in their best interest to keep a large number of worthless patents churning through the appeals process.

It would be interesting to see a comparison of the fees they collect for rejected patents vs granted patents vs appealed patents.

I'm not necessarily against the patent office having increased their fees if it has been done to reflect more closely the real cost of a review. The reason a company tries to get a patent removed is that they stand to make a profit from that decision.

On the other hand I do think that to level the playing field these fees should be waived for not-for-profit organizations and if this review is requested by a small business or an individual and either can prove a revenue below a certain threshold they should be offered a highly discounted fee.

This way you don't stifle startups or hurt the small inventors but big corporations which can make millions from anulling a patent they might have had to license instead can spread the love around a bit.

I'm not necessarily against the patent office having increased their fees if it has been done to reflect more closely the real cost of a review. The reason a company tries to get a patent removed is that they stand to make a profit from that decision.

On the other hand I do think that to level the playing field these fees should be waived for not-for-profit organizations and if this review is requested by a small business or an individual and either can prove a revenue below a certain threshold they should be offered a highly discounted fee.

This way you don't stifle startups or hurt the small inventors but big corporations which can make millions from anulling a patent they might have had to license instead can spread the love around a bit.

New news today. It has been discovered that apple, Microsoft, oracle, sap, et al, have all set up small "independent" subsidiary companies to take on some experimental work. An oracle spokesman said that the move was an experiment to see how a small team would fair without the support of the parent company.

In other news, the number patent review requests has achieved a 10,000% increase over the last 3 months. An apple spokesman is on record as saying that its nothing to do with them.

Patent Office gets permission to set own fees.Patent Office jacks up fees on processes that essentially claim the PO screwed up and shouldn't have granted the patent in the first place.

...

What am I missing here?

The fact that Congress takes most of the PTO's money.The fact you don't have to be a lawyer or have any kind of training to be an Examiner...and if you want to require lawyers, be prepared to pay a LOT more.The fact that Examiners are on a production system...they have a limited amount of time to find prior art to apply and can't keep searching forever. The priority date for this patent is 1996. In this tech, that is absolutely ancient.

I'm not necessarily against the patent office having increased their fees if it has been done to reflect more closely the real cost of a review. The reason a company tries to get a patent removed is that they stand to make a profit from that decision.

On the other hand I do think that to level the playing field these fees should be waived for not-for-profit organizations and if this review is requested by a small business or an individual and either can prove a revenue below a certain threshold they should be offered a highly discounted fee.

This way you don't stifle startups or hurt the small inventors but big corporations which can make millions from anulling a patent they might have had to license instead can spread the love around a bit.

New news today. It has been discovered that apple, Microsoft, oracle, sap, et al, have all set up small "independent" subsidiary companies to take on some experimental work. An oracle spokesman said that the move was an experiment to see how a small team would fair without the support of the parent company.

In other news, the number patent review requests has achieved a 10,000% increase over the last 3 months. An apple spokesman is on record as saying that its nothing to do with them.

Really? Really?

You honestly think that a company like MS or Apple is going to go through the hasstle and expense of creating a new company to save a few thousand dollars?

Plus, how hard would it to just say that companies must be independent, not owned by anyone else, to benefit from the discointed fees. You have to disclose all thst kind of information when you start a company (capital contributions, shareholders, board members etc) so it wouldn't be hard to check.

Come to think about it, they would probably have to pay each of the members of the board over 25 k a month anyway.

I'm not necessarily against the patent office having increased their fees if it has been done to reflect more closely the real cost of a review. The reason a company tries to get a patent removed is that they stand to make a profit from that decision.

On the other hand I do think that to level the playing field these fees should be waived for not-for-profit organizations and if this review is requested by a small business or an individual and either can prove a revenue below a certain threshold they should be offered a highly discounted fee.

This way you don't stifle startups or hurt the small inventors but big corporations which can make millions from anulling a patent they might have had to license instead can spread the love around a bit.

New news today. It has been discovered that apple, Microsoft, oracle, sap, et al, have all set up small "independent" subsidiary companies to take on some experimental work. An oracle spokesman said that the move was an experiment to see how a small team would fair without the support of the parent company.

In other news, the number patent review requests has achieved a 10,000% increase over the last 3 months. An apple spokesman is on record as saying that its nothing to do with them.

Forgive me if I misinterpret what you mean, but if by "patent review requests" you mean requests for reexamination at the USPTO, the dramatic increase is probably due to the recent kicking in of higher fees, and a rush to file these requests before the increased fees applied.

I don't normally like how the EFF ends up defending piracy even if the primary goal is internet freedom. But this is such an obvious moral and just fight that is for the benefit of the whole world and to the detriment of no one besides the patent troll. I just donated $100. Thanks for fighting the good fight.

To start with, the granted patents bring in maintenance fees over the life of the patent. The filing fees for rejected patents are only in the hundreds to a few thousand dollars, depending upon the research fees. But the maintenance fees are $12.6K over the life of the patent.

This part at least is similar to the fee schedules used by most other patent offices. The idea is to keep the filing fees and more importantly search fees within reasonable limits (personal definitions of reasonable may vary) so that small companies and individuals aren't completely excluded from the system. Search fees in particular are heavily subsidised.

The patent office then recovers its costs for those subsidies from renewal fees. Most renewal fees are annual and applicants start paying them 4-5 years after they file their patent. Renewal fees also tend to start fairly low and gradually ramp up over the lifetime of the patent. The reasoning is that the longest lived patents are creating the most value for the applicant (if they weren't, they would be abandoned) and so any applicant bothering to maintain a patent that long can afford to pay a bit more for renewal fees. The US system is slightly different but again, the renewal fees to ramp up over time.

I know for a fact that Adam Carolla is not rich, his show his paid by sponsors and the show itself has a very small stafff, and the yearly budget is not millions of dollars or likely even half a million a year.

Even if the defendants could afford their own defend, should they spend their own money, if their legal case could determine the fate of other defendants in similar case against this patent troll?

New news today. It has been discovered that apple, Microsoft, oracle, sap, et al, have all set up small "independent" subsidiary companies to take on some experimental work. An oracle spokesman said that the move was an experiment to see how a small team would fair without the support of the parent company.

In other news, the number patent review requests has achieved a 10,000% increase over the last 3 months. An apple spokesman is on record as saying that its nothing to do with them.

Forgive me if I misinterpret what you mean, but if by "patent review requests" you mean requests for reexamination at the USPTO, the dramatic increase is probably due to the recent kicking in of higher fees, and a rush to file these requests before the increased fees applied.

You have mis-interpreted , my post wasn't actual current news, it was an example of what the news may be like if nibblers suggestions were brought in.